The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston

O i N February 2, I785, the Massachusetts Centinel in Boston complained that We daily see men speculating, with impunity, on the most essential articles of life, and grinding the faces of the poor and laborious as if there was no God, yet five months later to the day, Sam Adams wrote to his cousin John, You would be surprizd to see the Equipage, the Furniture and expensive Living of too many, the Pride and Vanity of Dress which pervades thro every Class, confounding every Distinction between the Poor and the Rich.' As these quotations suggest, opinion divided sharply in post-Revolutionary Boston on the direction of major social change, and impressionistic evidence can be found to sustain a broad range of interpretation. Relying on this material, historians have perpetuated the contemporary diversity of opinion. Scholars of the Progressive era, like J. Franklin Jameson, tended to agree with Adams that the Revolution had a leveling effect, while more recent studies have found some change as whigs replaced tories and a new propertied class emerged, but less democratization than had been supposed.2 This essay attempts to discover the magnitude of change in Boston from I77I to I790 by testing controllable, quantitative materials to answer the following questions: How did the town's occupational structure change? Did the distribution of wealth become more or less equal? How closely related were wealth and status? Did political power become more democratically shared? By how much did population increase?